I'm the Chief Product Officer of Forbes Media. It's been a long journey: The New York Times, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, a little tabloid TV, AOL -- and I certainly don't want to forget TMZ. I lived through a newspaper strike (sounds quaint, right?), the New York City Black Out in '77, and my bout with the Cabbage Patch Dolls. I was the founder and CEO of True/Slant, which FORBES invested in and acquired four years ago. I got hooked on the News business as the student editor of The Daily Iowan during the days of Vietnam, Watergate and Roe v. Wade. I can quote all the best lines from "All the President's Men," and I still think Howard Beale did it better than all the real-life pretenders who followed him. I owe so much to James Bellows -- a truly gifted editor, an extraordinary human being and a mentor who was always there for me.

Long-Form Journalism, Part II: The Challenge for Reporters, and What Forbes Is Doing About It

I seem to have touched a journalistic raw nerve with my post last week. It was about in-depth reporting and writing and how it’s finding a digital audience on Forbes.com, ReadItLater, longreads, The Atavist and other Web sites, apps, communities and startups that aggregate inquisitive readers. So far, the post has generated 1,800 tweets (that’s a lot for me). Nearly all expressed some anxiety that a cherished media form was in danger of extinction and a measure of relief that perhaps there was still hope after all.

Here’s the thing. The future is bright for all forms of journalism, long form included. The supply of credible — and I stress credible — information can’t seem to meet the insatiable demand for news in the digital era. That’s definitely not to say journalists can simply wake up in the morning and merrily do what they did in the grand old days of media privilege. If you want to cover a beat and write a 5,000-word story then you need to find and build an audience for it — and that takes time and a new level of expertise. The rise of digital publishing, social media and the resulting audience fragmentation requires journalists — for that matter, all content creators — to embrace and learn new ways.

FORBES, a traditional media company that deeply believes in the values journalists hold dear, is leading the way by making it possible for our editors, staffers and hand-selected contributors (authors, academics, topic experts and business leaders) to publish on Forbes.com so their voices can be heard amid all the noise. We’re building a new economic model for journalism, a new kind of newsroom — and developing management systems for both. We’ve launched unique consumer experiences (with exciting new enhancements on the way) that put our authoritative journalism at the center of a social media experience. I put the last three words in italics for a reason. For journalists, they signify the absolute need to engage and transact with news consumers, each other — and dare I say marketers, too (I can hear the howling now). And they need to do it in full public view, in real-time and all the time.

Perhaps most important for the 1,000 content creators at FORBES, we’re building the tools they need to quickly and easily publish text (long form or short form), photos and video; to communicate and engage in rewarding discussion with their audience; to market themselves and their content; and to make money if they attract and build a loyal audience.

It takes work on their part, from using our “Headline Grab” tool to share what they’re reading; to writing short posts, long ones and everything in between on our highly customized WordPress platform; to using our tools to drag-and-drop photos into their posts, or insert photo galleries that they assemble; to creating videos or embedding relevant videos in their stories; to inserting charts and graphics; to programming related content of their choice (just like I did to the left) with our Vest Pocket tool; to “Calling Out” rewarding and productive users comments — and responding to those comments; to simultaneously publishing on Forbes.com, Twitter and Facebook; to activating Facebook Subscribe; and to working with our producer desk to master the tools and our Audience Development team to tap the Web’s many information ecosystems for readers. As Andrea Spiegel, who runs our digital product development says: “We’re building the tools so journalists can determine how best to cover their beat to serve the audience they want to build.”

I remember when I returned to FORBES 20 months ago. One of the first things we did was to put a page-view counter at the top of every post. “You need to know if anyone is reading what you do,” I would say. Some of the early page-view counts embarrassed staffers and contributors. They would quickly cry for home page promotion, thinking that would boost their traffic. That’s not how you do it, I would say. There’s a big World Wide Web out there. There’s Google search. There’s this new thing, the Social Web (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn). Focus on your expertise, write great headlines and engage, I told them. Go find your audience.

Fast-forward to today. I can’t remember the last time someone requested home page promotion to drive page views to their short or long stories. Staffers and contributors literally stop publishing if there is a technical glitch with the page-view counter — they now value it as a vital feedback loop. Many have audiences of 500,000 users a month, some 600,000 — all the way up to one million or more. In the last year, Forbes.com traffic has nearly doubled — to 29 million monthly unique users (as measured by Omniture). Many contributors who participate in our incentive payment program are beginning to earn solid monthly freelance incomes. Some have scored book deals and other assignments because of their work on FORBES or the audience they’ve attracted. They’ve built respected individual brands under the umbrella FORBES brand.

All this brings me back to long-form journalism. I’ve talked about how Matt Herper, a FORBES staffer who covers the pharmaceutical industry, does it. I’ve written about how staffer Andy Greenberg will soon come out with a new book because of the contacts and audience he built around his individual brand on Forbes.com. Contributor David Disalvo has found similar success — and a book deal. Recent events lead me to Kashmir Hill, who has truly found her digital rhythm and is working to find her long-form journalism voice.

I have a new tool that I can't take my eyes off, courtesy of our partner, Betaworks. It's a real-time heat map, or browser overlay (still in beta), that shows me the top 10 clicks on every screen. This is a piece of the overlay on Kashmir's Facebook post. It shows Page 2 of the Next Page was the top click.

Kashmir covers digital privacy issues, quite a hot topic in the era of social media. Her monthly audience on Forbes.com runs about 500,000 and sometimes more, with a strong repeat visitor base. She has 6,700 Twitter followers, 530 followers on Forbes.com and 40,000 Facebook Subscribe public followers. Kashmir’s inserted herself into the fabric of her community by using all the methods outlined above, including curating and filtering content for her followers (as she did with a recent New York Times magazine story). In the current issue of FORBES magazine Kashmir has a long piece on Facebook’s Top Cop. Since it was published on Forbes.com, she’s made a strong connection with her audience despite modest page views (perhaps this print-story-turned-post needed a more Web-friendly headline, not the magazine version). At the moment I checked on Friday night, nearly 40% of users continued to the second screen of her story and almost 100% of those who did read the last two pages.

Greg McNeal, a FORBES contributor, commented on my last post, citing Kashmir’s long-form story as part of his new digital reading habits:

My consumption of written information in the last two weeks included Marc Ambinder’s 80 page e-book, a few 35,000 word law review articles in .PDF form and in print form, Kash Hill’s longer piece on Facebook’s security officer, blog posts from dozens of websites, and of course the daily dose of Tweets with links to blogs, and long and short form journalism. I started some of my reading on my iPhone, continued to read them on my iPad, and finished them on my laptop or desktop computer in all manner of places (Starbucks, office, couch, car, etc.)

Over the last few months, 20% of Forbes.com traffic has come in through our new mobile site — and it spiked even higher a few weekends ago. The iPhone, iPad and Android breakdown fascinates me, as do the number of pages users of each device consume (a little tip here: the industry is gaga over apps, but keep an eye on the browser). As Chief Product Officer, it’s my job to devour the data across our digital and print products — and the interaction between the two — and to develop appropriate short form and long form consumer experiences.

FORBES has become a disruptor in the media industry, but that doesn’t mean we can just sit back. Disruptive competitors are everywhere. Journalists need to grasp that concept for themselves. They’ve been disrupted by a new breed of native digital reporter who grew up with the new tools of the trade just like I grew up using a CRT rather than an IBM Selectric. And they’ve been disrupted by all the knowledgeable people out there who can publish content even without working for a newspaper, magazine, broadcast or cable network — and find an audience through social media (no home page traffic required).

So, if journalists learn the tools, study the usage data and engage with their audience through desktop, mobile, tablet and print, too, then they’ve got a good shot at a future in long form, short form and every type of journalism in between.

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Well said, LD. The key here is that our staff reporters and contributors are covering beats — they have topic-specific expertise. They are not just deciding to write a long-form piece or a curated synopsis, they are deciding how best to cover their beat for their audience. That means they use all of the tools at their disposal to create their content: headline grabs, original reporting, riffs on other stories in their beat, and yes, long-form pieces. It’s a mult-dimensional effort. As we build the FORBES digital experience, we’re constantly thinking about how we can make it easier for our reporters, contributors and marketers to create, distribute and participate. Then we match that by making it easier for users to join in and build relationships with our writers, setting us down the path for an open, social news exchange.

They say that today we are inundated with information, I disagree. Today we are inundated with data, interference, and noise. Information, which by definition must be credible, is the process of discarding the noise and interference and deriving some meaning or truth from the data. A good journalist derives meaning from the plethora of data available, he teases information from the data while correctly identifying and discarding the noise and interference. I think the need for this is greater than ever and as we move through the paradigm shift of data overload the role and value of good journalism will become more clear.

Very interesting. One question if I may: When you talk about building an audience, are you talking just about individuals or institutions? When you say that people aren’t asking for homepage placement anymore, I assume it’s because they’ve built personal audiences. So, in your opinion, is that what you mean about building an audience — individual writers finding readers for their copy? Is there still value in creating curated landing pages for a mass audience, or do you believe it’s more important for individual writers to build their brands and audiences in social media? Is it a fool’s errand to try and build an audience for the home page or landing page, and are efforts better spent on building niche audiences through writers? Okay, that’s a couple questions. Thanks, Chris.

Right now, it’s mainly individuals who are building brands on Forbes.com. But we’re evolving into a platform, so other “institutional” content brands can also use our tools to publish content. We have one or two already, and more will come in the months ahead. And yes — it’s the job of individual writers to market themselves across the social web. We have an Audience Development team to advise and assist them, but the individual must take accountability. That said, AD also does deals with larger partners (such as the portals) that individual writers can benefit from. I’ve never been a fan of topic pages, though they do serve a purpose. We’ll be launching some new types of real-time pages, so stay tuned. Bottom line: the Web is about verticals and niches within verticals. They all make up larger information ecosystems with passionate news enthusiasts. You just have to find them and become part of the fabric of the community.

As the owner of the photo used to open this article, the stack of “the long good read” newspapers can I ask what your policy on crediting and linking back to photos is?

The photo is published under Creative Commons licence but that license requires attribution, and ideally a link back to the source:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/revdancatt/5558653828/

I wouldn’t mind so much, but as the photo is actually from a long-form digital journalism project, the very stuff you’re talking about (and the reason why you’ve used it) it would be polite to have mentioned it, or at least given a link back to source so interested people could read more about the project.

I think the “intersection of digital journalism and social media” should also including respecting copyright, no?